A novel systemic taxonomy of trust in the online environment (invited paper)

Abstract

Trust and reputation comprise a wide research area in social sciences, but are also pillars of many social phenomena that shape the Internet socio-economic scene. The blossoming of virtual communities largely changed the way trust is formed and propagated. The few existing taxonomies provide only initial insights into the ways trust-benefits can be felt; they are neither complete nor elaborated in a systemic manner to provide a proper framework guided by real system-principles. In this paper, we propose a multidimensional framework for guiding the design-process, and assessing the completeness and consistency of reputation systems. Our framework is based on System theory principles; it identifies reputation system components, and more importantly, defines their interrelations. It considers the interaction-centric, dynamic and environment-dependent trust-establishment and detects five major factors that guide reputation mechanisms design. The presented framework is applied to BarterCast reputation mechanism deployed in the BitTorrent-client Tribler. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.